Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: 2. "Instant Cohousing" Move-In-Ready apartment in Oakland (CA) great neighborhood: onsite meeting Sunday PM (Raines Cohen)

[Raines Cohen (rc3-coho-L]

> On Mon, 22 Jun 2009, R.N. Johnson wrote:
>
> How exciting!  Living in an "instant" cohousing community (after more than 6 
> years of searching, meetings, etc), I am surprised that more people have not 
> done the same. I will try to contact some of our list lurkers and former 
> members who live in the East Bay and send them out.

Randa -

Thanks for letting people know. The meeting was held yesterday evening
(around 20 people there, including what seems to be a core group
taking shape, with some participants with extensive cohousing
experience and group-process training), but we are scheduling
additional ones; send them to the About pages in the East Bay
Cohousing website to learn more: http://www.ebcoho.org/

Since we've had some people express skepticism/concern about how much
community you can get without years of working together in advance, or
the difficulty of taking big co-investment steps and making the
financial commitment, perhaps you can talk about the early days of
formation and/or current community life at New Brighton sometime, via
the list or a cohousing.org blog post.

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Matt Lawrence <matt [at] technoronin.com> 
wrote:
>I've been looking for 20 years and have not succeeded.  It's getting 
>depressing.

Matt, have you taken a look at what factors limit your options and
re-evaluated how important they are, what you're willing to trade off
for another? My friend Diana Leafe Christian's "Finding Community"
book talks a lot about the process of searching and connecting with
potential communities.

Raines Cohen, Cohousing Coach http://www.CohousingCoach.com/
Planning for Sustainable Communities
at Berkeley (CA) Cohousing